Popular new foods

Part 2 of my series of notes on presentations at the Personalized Nutrition Innovation Summit in June 2019

Food marketing research company Datassential says these are the fastest-growing new flavors

They have a database of every new restaurant opening in the country, and they say the hottest restaurant trends are:

• Levantine food (hummus, baba ghanoush, zaatar, and a new thing called sumac)
• Asian sweets (e.g. mochi, egg waffles, shaved snow, sesame rice balls) — mostly because they’re instagrammable
• Regional Japanese (e.g. takayaki, okonomoyaki). Izakaya is one of the hottest new trends in restaurant types

Best new flavorings:

1. nduja (a type of sausage)
2. aleppo pepper (a turkish thing)
3. Furikake (Yes!)
4. shakshuka (Israeli egg+tomato dish)

Hottest new items on restaurant menus:

1. chia seeds
2. bee pollen
3. turmeric
4. spirulina

and also:

1. “adaptogen”
2. “sea buckthorn”

They really like the midwest chain “True Food Kitchen”

GenZ wants “new for new’s sake”, versus boomers who want health or other items mor

Food trends

They distinguish among several overall trends in the past 25 years to show how the food industry is changing:

• Health 1.0 (Until 2000) “weight management”
• Health 2.0 “feel good” local, fair trade, etc. (2000-now)
• Health 3.0 “functional” superfoods, etc. (2010-)
• Health 4.0 personalized (2020-)